What you want to do is commonly called "launch an external program and display a file through it", or at least that's how I understand your question.

If you're using Windows, it is really easy to launch whatever program the user configured for whatever kind of file you want to "display":


my @args = ("start",$file,$file);
for (@args) {
  # Apply smart-ish double quotes
  if (/ /) { $_ = qq{"$_"}; }
};
system(@args) == 0
  or warn "Couldn't launch '$file' : $!/$?/$^E";

[download]

Under Unix, it is much harder to know what program the user wants to be launched and you will likely want to make this an option in a config file or in the environment. The idea still remains the same though.

Updated: Fixed missing closing brace, spotted by rcseege

In reply to Re: Perl Tk: opening a file in its original format by Corion
in thread Perl Tk: opening a file in its original format by FM

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